Extra Credit (28 page)

“Guy’s ready to have a stroke,” the older cop answered; his name was MacGyver. No joke. I wondered whether, if I gave him a paper clip, some Crazy Glue, and a rubber band, he could catapult me back to my town, where I would do nothing but go to school and then return home, content to never find out why Chick Stepkowski had two hundred and fifty g’s that Sassy Du Pris wanted. Or why Tim, Christine’s new husband, maybe wanted it, too. Or why his kids looked like trolls.

We stood by the side of the police car, wondering if the cops were going to take us back to the Elegant Majestic or even let Crawford know that we were safe. I also wondered why it had taken them so long to get to us; surely Crawford had called right away? Or was this another one of his passive-aggressive attempts at teaching me a lesson about not sleuthing? It didn’t matter. After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, I asked them if they would take us back to the strip club.

“What do we look like?” MacGyver asked. “A taxi service?”

Kevin let out something between an outraged croak and a sob; it was hard to tell which one dominated the strangled noise. I put my arm around him. “Please?”

The cops burst out laughing; seems we had happened upon the comedy duo known as Stearns and MacGyver, comedians by day, cops by night. “Oh, your husband’s on the way. Don’t worry,” Stearns said and popped the locks on the door. “Hop in. We’ll take you to the station.”

Kevin and I jumped into the backseat, the Plexiglas between the front and back seats separating us from two cops for whom our plight was the most hysterical thing they had ever witnessed. In a few minutes, we were at the police station, where Carmen and Crawford were standing in the parking lot next to my car, Carmen looking far more distressed than Crawford, who was becoming used to my disappearances. I guessed that Crawford had driven my car here and Carmen had drawn the short straw and taken the smelly Crown Vic.

From a distance, Crawford looked nonplussed. When I got up close, I could see the grim set to his mouth and his bloodshot eyes, which were a dead giveaway that not only was he upset, he was ticked off. At whom was anyone’s guess. I was hoping it was Sassy.

Kevin got out of the police car and dramatically knelt and kissed the ground in thanks, the events of the evening finally taking their full toll on him. Carmen rushed over and knelt beside him, asking him if he was okay.

“Breathe,
padre
,” she said. Stearns asked her if she needed a bus, cop-speak for “ambulance,” thinking that Kevin had gone into some kind of swoon.

I walked over to Crawford, and he hugged me, uncharacteristically, his penchant for public displays of affection being virtually nonexistent. “What the hell happened?” he asked into my hair, now a frizzed-out mess under my baseball cap after the evening’s festivities.

“I guess we were kidnapped by Sassy Du Pris,” I said.

He held me at arm’s length. “You don’t seem upset.”

“I never thought she was going to hurt us,” I said, “and she didn’t.” I leaned against the car. “I don’t know why she did what she did, and I don’t know why she wanted the money so badly, and I honestly don’t know why I was so sure she wasn’t going to hurt us.” I put a hand to my head. “Man, I’m tired. Are you tired?”

I was getting to that point where laughter turns to crying, and the word “punchy” didn’t even begin to describe my muddled mind.

Kevin turned to Stearns. “She had a gun, and she was going to use it on us if we didn’t do what she said,” he said, but it sounded like he was making an excuse for getting in the van rather than indicting Sassy on any kind of charge of violence.

“This is pretty serious stuff,” Crawford said, echoing my thoughts and the understatement of the year.

When I was sure no one was looking, I handed Crawford the gun.

MacGyver approached Crawford, his belly mesmerizing me as it swayed to and fro over his belt. “Hey, Detective?”

Crawford turned and looked at him.

“They’ve got the van. It’s at a rest stop near the Bear Mountain Bridge.”

We waited.

“But no driver.”

Thirty-Six

It was a long night. The Yorktown police took our statements and then compared them and then asked us to go over what had happened one more time. By the time they were done, I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened and when, but I did know one thing: I had one more thing to tell them.

As we were leaving, Officer Stearns was at the front counter of the police station. “Officer?” I said, getting his attention.

“Yes, ma’am?” he responded, turning to face me.

“There’s a house on Mount Pleasant, number 43 if memory serves, and a young lady named Brianna lives there.”

He looked at me, an odd expression on his face. “Right, Brianna MacGyver.” He pointed toward an office off the lobby. “Sarge’s girl.”

“Oh,” I said, tensing when I realized where this was going. Crawford tightened his arm around my waist, and Kevin shot me a look that told me he thought we were getting into dangerous territory, never mind breaking a promise we swore to keep when Brianna handed us the phone.

Stearns waited. “About Brianna?”

“Well, she’s a lovely girl,” I said. “She let us use the phone so that we could call my husband.”

Crawford says that every time I use the word “lovely,” I’m lying. He’s right.

Stearns looked relieved. He hadn’t known what I was going to tell him, of course, but something had given him the impression it wasn’t going to be good.

Crawford asked me if I was done remarking on the offspring of the officers in attendance and I assured him that I was. Anything to get us out of this godforsaken town and its police station.

Once we were in the car, Crawford turned around, his arm on the back of his seat, and looked at Kevin. “So how did you end up in this mess?” he asked, shooting a look at me.

Kevin, exhausted beyond belief, couldn’t even string a sentence together anymore after admonishing me about keeping Brianna MacGyver’s secret. “Oh, I … I … guess…”

“Sounds like you don’t know,” Crawford said, helping out. “Where’s your car?” I gave Crawford the location of the diner, one that he was familiar with but didn’t know that I was, too. “This was carefully thought out,” he said, almost sounding impressed.

I stared out the window the whole way to the diner, wondering how Sassy could have driven a van to a remote location, even more remote than Turkey Mountain, and then disappeared again. Before tonight, it was almost as if she didn’t really exist, our interaction with her had been so intermittent and brief; now, even after the evening that I had had, I was sure she wasn’t an apparition. She was the real deal, but definitely more sympathetic than I had expected, despite her penchant for breaking into things and stealing giant man clothes.

We dropped Kevin at the diner, and he ran to his car at top speed, jumping in and driving away, his face a blur as he passed us.

“Looks like he’s anxious to get home,” Crawford said, turning off the car and then turning to face me. He sighed. “I thought you didn’t want anything to do with this?” he asked.

“I didn’t,” I said, “but once I found out that she was tracking us down and thinking that we had the money, I had to find her and let her know that that’s not the case.”

“How did you find out she was headlining?”

“Same way you did.”

“You got a call from an informant?” he asked.

“No. We stalked her on Facebook.”

He put a hand to his chest. “Thank God. Because if I thought, even for a minute, that you now had paid informants working for you, I might have to reconsider this whole marriage thing.”

I feigned shock and hurt. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” he said, starting the car again and backing out of the spot. “Maybe you can leave this alone now?”

“Sure,” I said, preoccupied. “Of course. Whatever you say.” I was thinking about everything Kevin had told me, how he wanted to go back to the priesthood and how Max was angry at me, two things that would require a lot more in terms of brain cells than I had to devote to them at the moment. Crawford didn’t seem to notice that I wasn’t really listening to his diatribe—one that had the hallmarks of one of his usuals, including asking me to mind my own business, stay out of the way of police, leave well enough alone … blah, blah, blah. While he nattered on, I texted Max to ask how she was doing and to see if she had any information about her father’s arrangements. I knew I wouldn’t hear, given the hour, but hoped that she would at least text me back in the morning, which was rapidly approaching.

We made it home in record time, and I was in bed just minutes after walking through the back door. Crawford followed behind me, rolling into my body and pulling me close. “You need to promise me that you’ll stay out of trouble.”

I yawned loudly, tears of exhaustion leaking out of the corners of my eyes. “You got it, chief.”

“I’m serious, Alison. It seems like we have a conversation like this every few months. What will it take to keep you at school and out of everyone else’s business?” he asked.

I was so tired I didn’t even have a witty response.

“You have to drive me to work tomorrow because my car is still at the precinct.”

I responded by yawning again.

“So that means we get up at six.”

It was three. Three hours before I had to get up. I tried not to focus on that or the hand that was slowly creeping up the front of my T-shirt. Ultimately, resistance was futile, and by the time I actually fell asleep, I could hear the sound of newspapers hitting various front steps all up and down my street. It didn’t take any of my incredible skills of deduction to know that the day ahead of me was going to stink, big-time.

Thirty-Seven

Mary Lou Bannerman was waiting for me at my office door, an eager smile on her face and a bag in her hand that looked suspiciously like it had come from my new favorite bakery near her home. On the floor, next to her feet, was a cardboard coffee cup holder with two of the biggest cups of coffee I had ever seen wedged into its slots. I didn’t know whether to burst into tears or drop to my knees; after only sleeping a couple of hours and then braving rush-hour traffic to get Crawford to work on time before heading to St. Thomas, I was a basket case. The sight of this wonderful, thoughtful woman, armed with my breakfast, was a sight for sore eyes.

“Good morning,” she said in a chipper voice.

“Good morning,” I said, wondering, with the sunlight streaming through the back windows of my office, if I would be able to take off my sunglasses at any point during the day. First there was the issue of the giant dark circles under my eyes, and then there was the light sensitivity that accompanies sleep deprivation. Not a pretty picture overall. I opened my office door and peeked over the top of my sunglasses to get a sense of how bad this might be. Bad. I turned to Mary Lou. “You’re going to have to excuse me. I need to keep my sunglasses on for at least the beginning of our conversation. I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I have a raging headache.”

She clucked sympathetically. “I hate when that happens. Insomnia?”

“Something like that,” I said cryptically.

“This may not be the best time, then,” she said.

I settled in behind my desk, wondering when she was going to offer me what was in the bag.

“To go over some questions I had about my story?” she asked, looking so enthusiastic for my help that it almost broke my heart. She was trying so hard but didn’t have the confidence yet to write with the training wheels off, so to speak, still feeling a little self-conscious and thinking that she didn’t belong. To her mind, she was not a writer and didn’t have any business in a class with young adults. Every time class ended, I attempted to disabuse her of both notions and encouraged her to come see me for help. I just wished that today hadn’t been one of the days she did, the coffee and whatever baked good was in the bag notwithstanding.

It was hard to look positive peering out from behind big black sunglasses, but I did my best. I peered over the top again; nope, still sunny. “Sure, Mary Lou. What questions do you have?” I hoped they weren’t hard to answer; I had nothing in the tank.

She pulled out a big sheaf of papers and started thumbing through them, identifying places where she was stuck or where she had a question about how to proceed. All told, there were twenty different queries that we miraculously managed to get through before I had to go to class. About midway through, I was able to take off my sunglasses without feeling like someone was driving a steak knife through each eye, and Mary Lou’s sharp intake of breath at my appearance didn’t go unnoticed by me.

The only thing that reminded her that she still hadn’t given me either the coffee or the muffin or scone in the bag was the persistent rumble of my stomach after we had finished going through her story.

“Oh! I forgot,” she said, handing me the coffee and the bag.

Inside was a giant piece of crumb cake, powdered sugar covering the brown peaks that dotted the top. I nearly wept with joy. “Thank you, Mary Lou. This looks delicious,” I said, daintily breaking off a piece. The minute she left my office, I was going to shove the entire piece in my mouth and wash it down with scalding hot coffee, those two things in combination in my stomach being the only way I was going to get through the day. I stared lovingly at the crumb cake, trying to tell her with my mind that she needed to leave so that we could be alone.

Mary Lou had other plans, namely finding out how I was doing. “Are you okay?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair, her hands clasped together between her knees. “I mean, really okay?”

It wasn’t until she asked that I realized I wasn’t. I was tired, overwrought, and grieving Max’s father. I was holding it together, but barely. Someone showing a little compassion, like she was, was dangerous, and I feared that if I opened my mouth, I would crumble. I nodded and smiled in an effort to assure her that I was absolutely fine.

“You just look so tired,” she said. “I hope you’re not burning the candle at both ends.” Her smile was sad. “You look like you need a hug.”